keith haring’s subway epiphany

keith haring

Recently, we stumbled on a slideshow of the brilliant drawings artist Keith Haring made on New York Subway walls during the 1980’s. To take the subway in New York was to be constantly surprised by the energetic, white chalk-on-black, hand-drawn visions where advertising should have been. But what inspires us most is reading Haring’s story of how he came to envision the subways as a drawing space:

December 1980, still in December probably, I go into the subway one day and see for the first time an empty black palate which has been put there to cover an old advertisement. I find out recently that they had been put there for years. I’ve seen photographs from the 40s and 50s, old subway photographs where there are these empty black panels. So it wasn’t a new thing, but I had just never seen it before.

But somehow this one day when I saw it going down in the entrance near my apartment at the time (the F train at 6 ave and 41st street), I saw this empty black panel, and immediately I knew that I had to draw on top of this panel. It was a waiting perfect surface.

The paper they use to cover it is a soft matt black paper. If they had used shiny paper none of this would have ever happened. But they had this soft matt surface that was dying to get drawn on.

If you’ve found illumination, joy, or inspiration in this post, please consider supporting Improvised Life. It only takes a minute to make a secure donation that helps pay our many costs. A little goes a long way towards helping Improvised Life continue to live ad-free in the world.

One thought on “keith haring’s subway epiphany”

This brings back such memories of living in New York during the 80’s, and seeing Keith Haring’s drawings in the subway… that was before people started ripping them down to take home for themselves. NY was a hothouse of creativity at the time, and the dark side to that was the greed that coexisted alongside.